Re: index growth

Tom Lane wrote:
> Alex Mayrhofer <axelm@nona.net> writes:
>> i have a bunch of indices over rather frequently updated large tables. Those
>> indices grow in size with the updates, so i frequently re-index them.
>
> That usually shouldn't be necessary since PG 7.4 or so.  Do you have
> some strange pattern of index key usage that is triggering index bloat,
> or is this just a habit leftover from pre-7.4?

Hmm, my index definition (running 8.1.0) looks as follows:

 Index "public.l_renderjobs_uri_idx"
   Column    |          Type
-------------+------------------------
 request_uri | character varying(200)
btree, for table "public.l_renderjobs"

a recent REINDEX reduced that index from about 30000 pages to 18000.

The table contains about 1.5 millions URLs, and i load http usage updates on
the table every day, which modifies around 40000 of those records daily.

So, is this something where bloating should be expected, or am i doing
something wrong?

thanks,

Alex